Kat has a close call (but she's ok)

Well getting to work at the start of the week is usually pretty uneventful but this week I had an email from Kat waiting for me. She said she had concussion and a broken boat after her weekend's adventures... no more details!! Today I finally got the whole story -

"Mmmm pretty serious carnage with a dent + hole in the nose of my playboat,broken helmet (well, it's cracked so I guess I need a new one),concussion, black eye & 3 chipped teeth for me, and I nearly lost my paddle... geez things can turn bad quickly, and I don't even have any photos to show for it! I was doing some park and huck off a 8m waterfall just by the sea which has a reputation for being safe (but not at low tide which I found out the hard way).

There was loads of water from all the rain we had so when Igot caught up on a boil and couldn't make the ferry all the way across the river to run the river right line I settled for plan B (left of centre) which I'd scouted and still looked good to run... My first run was sweet, I ran it clean, made my line, nailed the landing and walked back up to run it again...Second run... All I remember was ferrying above the drop going for thesame line... then waking up downstream out of my boat, I guess I was offline, hit a rock at the bottom and got thrown out of my boat (?).

Apparently I floated down the next bit of rapid and got some downtime in a pourover. My boat had floated into an eddy upstream of where I was and Tim was pulling it out for me once he saw that I was getting myself out,so I swam to the bank and ran off downstream to find my $$ AT2 paddle, my vision was pretty f**ked up (seeing stars) so I nearly didn't find it (it is black)... pretty damn scary in hindsight, but the crazy thing is all I was worried about at the time was finding my paddle, I guess that's adrenalin hard at work. So off to hospital to get checked out, thankfully the doctor had done some paddling and even knew the drop so I didn't have to explain what the hellI was doing.

I attached a pic of the drop at high tide, it's anothermetre or so higher at low tide with a pourover and more rapids downstreamthat would be in the same shot. Now I'm back in town with a sore head and thankfull I was wearing a decenthelmet - pity it was such a shitty end to an otherwise awesome weekend (Igot 6 runs in over 3 days)" - Kat

So we're all really glad to hear that our Kat is ok. While she was off trying to kill herself we had a huge trip up to the white-water course in Penrith. It was a great weekend with Steff flying down from Brisbane and from Melbourne we had the usual crew - Kylie, Myself, Ruth, Ruthy, Kate, Michelle, Kimmy and a couple of boys to make the group up to 10.

Due to the low water levels in the lake at Penrith the bottom drop was steep and kinda munchy which provided a fair bit of entertainment a few swims. I floated into the middle of it to see what would happen and ended up surfing for a fair while with about three power flips and rolls in there as well!

Didn't get any photos as I was too busy paddling but here's one from an earlier trip. (Check out that paddle twirl!).

Anyway so that's all the action for now, Uganda plans are on track with six chicks signed up. Marj and Steff from Brissy have been convinced so along with Kyles, Ruth and Kat it's looking like a formiddable team ;-)

:) Scarah